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Yesterday, PowerPoint and Word suddenly started to refuse to open. I’d get the splash screens saying “Starting…” but then they would disappear and… nothing. (I’m using Windows 10 version 1803 and Office Professional Plus 2016.)

First I searched to see if anyone else was suffering a similar problem. The recent Windows 10 version 1803 update was one of my prime suspects. I couldn’t find anything so I decided to take matters into my own hands.

I went to “Settings -> Apps -> Apps & Features -> Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2016 -> Modify”. That gave me two options: “Quick repair” and “Online repair”. I tried both, and they made no difference. I then did a full un-install and re-install of Office. Again, no joy. The threat of a full machine rebuild started to loom over me. I went to bed and attempted to get some sleep.

After lying awake for several hours I sneaked into my office at a ridiculous hour. I managed to find an interesting Microsoft support article. It describes the removal of some registry keys as a possible solution for start up problems with Word. I guess my search-fu is better at five in the morning.

Sure enough, when I removed the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Word and HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\PowerPoint keys, both the apps opened without problem!

Of course, I couldn’t stop there. Those registry keys have a lot of nested content, and I wanted to find out exactly what was causing the problem.

Some Roslyn-based analyzers for .NET are general in nature. They tend to focus on coding style, language use, or platform APIs. Others may be specific to a NuGet package. A package-specific analyzer provides messages and fixes tailored to use of that package. This is a great way for package authors to help improve your code or avoid even nasty bugs in production. Many popular open source packages are now shipping with a complementary analyzer. Today, I’m going to take a look at how we can package these package-specific analyzers.

I’m presenting a workshop tomorrow here at MicroCPH. Windows has a way of knowing the best times to apply major updates. Sure enough, Windows 10 version 1803 (April 2018 Update) appeared on my laptop yesterday. All seemed fine until I tried to do some work with git.

I use SSH rather than HTTPS to talk to git remotes. The SSH agent was up and running, with my SSH key added to it. Business as usual. The problems started when I ran git remote update. I was prompted for the password for my SSH key. Then I tried git push. Again I was prompted for my password. Git and the SSH agent were no longer friends.